May 26, 2016

They Come in Fits and Starts...

... do life's little miracles.

It's been a busy couples months. Aaron was fitted with a cochlear implant in April, and all indications are that we're finally on the way to getting him the clarity he needs. However, we did have to upset his world with one tiny adjustment...more...

August 24, 2015

Chugging along

New stuff:

GATE - Pretty interesting thought experiment. Pre-dates Rome, Sweet Rome by a couple years (based on the histories I've found). The "Rah! Rah! Nippon! Everyone else is evil!" tone that comes up later in the manga is a bit off-putting given the Japanese tendency to white-wash their prior behavior. And I can't help but notice that the majority of the fantastical equipment they've been using to dazzle the locals is imported.

From the Archives:

Girls und Panzer - Amusing. Doesn't take itself too seriously, which allows it to survive cursory scrutiny. Any further thought and the whole thing collapses. Now all the "Panzer Vor!" in World of Tanks chat makes a bit more sense. (Though I was somewhat aware of its provinence at the time.) Regret Level: Sugar-Cookie Breakfast.

Kancolle - All the train-wreck I expected it to be. Made entirely and solely for fans of the game. When it isn't boring, it's retarded. Also with the "rah-rah we didn't really start the Pacific war" BS. Regret Level: Midnight Nachos.

Started watching Gargantia. More thoughts will follow once I finish it.

July 21, 2015

Back in the Saddle Again.

It's been close to six years since I watched a new anime of any sort. Having your BT machine crap out, moving, getting married, having a kid and moving again can do that to a hobby sometimes. I was also driven off by the increasing and pervasive need for shows to pander to otaku perverts through gainaxing, panty-shots, needless yuri/yaoi and tentacle monsters.

Wonderduck's posts about Hibike piqued my interest enough to dive in to Crunchyroll (an innovation which is quite handy) for a marathon session getting caught up. Here was a simple show about band nerds doing band nerd stuff. I could get behind this. Other than a brief stupid dalliance with yuri for no good reason, it was an enjoyable show with extremely high production values.

Since then I've been binging on the various shows that I saw receiving praise over the last few years.

December 10, 2013

Kerbston, we have a problem

So a friend pointed me toward the Kerbal Space Program demo quite some time ago (long before the Mun was made available). At the time I thought it was fun, but I was too engrossed in World of Tanks to pay it much attention. Once 0.18 came out, I figured it was time to give it another shot.

I dabbled a bit on my own at first, but it wasn't until I combined the demo tutorial with some Youtube Let's Plays that I started having success getting to the Mun. Now it's a pretty regular thing. There are also some neat features to be explored on the surface of the Mun once you get proficient with landings. (I've even managed an orbital rendezvous, though without docking capabilities, all I could do was bang against a spent fuel tank.)

Here are some screens from one such Munar launch.

Our target is the arch near the north rim of the large crater that always faces Kerbal.

June 26, 2013

...For thinking I'd died. I promised myself I wouldn't let the place go feral for a year, and seeing as that is just a few days away, It's obvious I need to put up something, anything.

The long and short of it is, life with a toddler is busy. He's trying to get my attention through the glass door as I type.

The big thing at the moment is working on a move. Not far, but into a house that has room for us.

I've been tossing around ideas in my head for what to do with this place (the blargh that is), and nothing has struck a chord. As it is, nothing is really going to take off until the move shakes out anyway.

Anyway. That's an update, if you can call it that. Maybe I'll throw up some pics if time allows.

That precipitated a move to Houston in early October, and the wedding was just a week and a few days ago.

With the holidays bearing down on us, we're trying to decide exactly how to go about getting back to Arizona for Christmas with my family without being molested by Nappie's goons. We can either join the holiday migration through the airports and play Russian Roulette with the TSA, or rent a nice car and make the 1,200 mile drive between Houston and Phoenix for the 3rd and 4th time in as many months.

It had better be a damned nice car.

Speaking of cars. The Falcon did finally get "finished." (They never really are...) Finished enough that we took it up to the Run to the Pines car show in Pinetop-Lakeside, AZ the last weekend in September. It was a gorgeous two days, if a bit warm (and shade is always at a premium).

(Don't let the image fool you, this was just after sunrise when those pines are casting a nice long shadow. By mid-day, it was quite sunny, and at around 7000', it's easy to roast yourself.)

Falcon's are pretty rare these days, and we were stuck in a bit of a no-mans-land between stock restorations and truly custom/modified machines for class entry. When we liberated this car from its previous owners, they had done a bit too much damage for us to ever get the car back to truly "stock." But, we did what we could, while making some mechanical improvements to make the car a much better, more modern, vehicle to drive.

In the end we decided to enter in the stock class.

And we won it.

The thing about the Falcons is, for a certain age bracket, it seems like just about everyone has owned one at some point in their life. Both days at the show, the car was surrounded by people reminiscing about their own Falcons. I overheard one pair of ladies wondering to one another how they had ever managed the Nasty in such a small back seat. Then there was the little boy who decided he desperately needed to be under the hood snuggling with the 302 (I don't know what he had on his hands, but it took a bit of work to get it buffed off the grill).

June 14, 2010

Ohiisashiburidana!

Okay, I probably screwed up a couple long vowels in that title, but my give-a-shitter is on the fritz.

So... quite a lot has changed in the 9 or so months since my last posting.

Last fall I went dark about the time a friend, coworker, and mentor (henceforth referred to as Kahuna) was diagnosed with malignant liver cancer. The first round of chemo didn't have as much effect as the doctors hoped, but it did show promise if performed long-term. However, Kahuna had been through this once before. You see, in his early 20s, he developed malignant bone marrow cancer, went through a nasty battery of chemo, and made it through a 5% scenario with the loss of a leg. Thirty years later when cancer decided it hadn't done enough to him already, he wasn't going to put himself through more than one chemo regimen. Once off the treatment plan, the doctors gave him 5-6 months.

There was a trip to Dallas in November. December saw work really ratchet up and not let up until, well... I'll let you know when it lightens up. I have the good fortune to be at a construction company in Arizona that is pretty well positioned to weather the worst and keep us busy. December also saw a week-long visit by someone very special.

Early February saw me and my ever more significant other take a trip to Florida to watch the night launch of the Shuttle. That first scrub was a killer. *zzzzzZZZzzzzz*

March was fairly blah until a late trip to Houston gave me a chance to meet more of the potential in-laws.

April was off to a pretty good start when the news came that Kahuna had finally succumb to his cancer the Monday morning after Easter. Services were held the following Friday, and my now-truly-significant-other flew in to be with me. She had met Kahuna only briefly in December, but he's been such a big part of my life for the past eight years that she still came out for the service.

If there's one thing I learned from this episode, it's the care and dedication outfits like Hospice of the Valley bring to what is (or would be for me anyway) a truly depressing job.

Throughout all of this there have been a couple other things going on.

In mid-February I started having serious digestive problems. The most recent diagnosis is that I may have caeliac disease, which doesn't make much sense to me, given how gluten-heavy my diet has been for 30 years.

The other ongoing thing'ama'bob is the impending completion of the 64 Falcon. As of this last weekend, glass is in, headliner is in, carpet is in, door panels are ready for install, rear deck is in, seats are ready. The only thing preventing us from putting the seats in this last weekend were the kickpanels. Bastards just would not go in and it looks like the manufacturer either cut them a little short in the door jamb, or our bodywork has been previously "modified" by the chuckle-heads who started vandalizing this poor car before we got it away from them. Either way, once the kick panels are in, we can drop in the front seat, install the seatbelts, and she'll be completely road legal (well... except for the fact that the reverse lights aren't linked to the shifter yet).

I expect to take a short cruise this next weekend (Short, because the suspension has yet to be aligned)

You've been saying you'll be done with that car for 3 weeks now. I no longer believe.

Posted by: Esteban at June 16, 2010 06:52 PM (3GiN/)

4
Dad keeps quitting early. I want to keep working in the evenings, but by then he's spent. I can't exactly fault him. He's 67. This weekend, we put in the kick panels, lay in a bit of carpet (we didn't know we'd need to supply this particular piece ourselves), bolt in the seats and seat belts, and I think we'll be ready to roll. We'll need to check the various fluids and whatnot, but that's a 10 minute job.

September 30, 2009

Could this Airstrip be any more Isolated?

I'm back to wandering through Google maps, checking out whatever corner of the map intrigues me at the moment.

So I got to thinking about an old nature show describing the way the Hawaiian island chain is the result of a tectonic plate drifting over a hot spot in the mantle. Google long ago added sonar maps of the sea floor to their offerings. Today I just got to wandering along the submerged chain that never quite broke free of the surface when I panned across this.

Now the existence of that airstrip is going to bother me until I figure out when they decided to scrape up enough mud to break the surface, and what it was used for.

1
Looks like we are going to end up almost exactly 1/2 way between Uncle Steve and Uncle Will - around Sossman and Baseline. Not totally nailed down yet, but it looks good. Once the new TV is delivered we are going to have to fire up Anime night again!

6
Just no inspiration. Any good Youtube videos are pulled minutes after you link them. Iran could nuke DC right now, and I'm not sure I could muster a half-hearted "meh." I haven't watch a single new anime show in over a year, and work is actually beyond hopping right now. Blogging would be a chore right now.

August 31, 2009

Tonight, a Little Piece of Me Died

I've been online in varying capacities since October 1998 when I first signed up for AOL and paid for a second line to be strung into my parents' house.

For the first year I just bounced around doing not much. I didn't know a lot of people online. I'd IM with a few classmates I knew from meat-space, but that was about it. I hit various boards dedicated to Xenogears (because I was a total fanatic at the time), and played around on mp3.com before it turned respectable.

Then my friend Josh introduced me to the Wheel of Time series around Thanksgiving of 2000. I devoured the first 8 books in about 2 weeks. I read at work. I read before bed. I read on the fucking toilet. Then I immediately read them again. I started coming up with wild-ass theories about where the story was headed. Who was really who in disguise? On and on it went.

Not long after New Years 2001, I stumbled across a fansite called wotmania.com. It was a fanatic's dream. Theory posts! Encyclopedias! Vibrant discussions of all things Wheel of Time! Then there was the community itself. People from all over the world were on this site. Aussies, Scandis, Brits, Canucks, you name the place and there was probably somebody from there.

I was home! But...

It wasn't until that summer that I finally stopped lurking and devouring theory posts. Somebody asked about my favorite subject: Xenogears. So I just had to chime in. Suddenly I was involved. I dove in to a religious discussion. We talked politics. I lived on that site for the next three month.

Then came September 11, 2001. The board was chaos. Nobody knew what was going on. Every whacked out theory you could imagine was being thrown about. In the following days, I was flying around any board I could think of. RPGFan, theGIA (you might be noticing a trend...) Somewhere I found a link to Bill Whittle's page, ejectejecteject.com. From there I found IMAO, USS Clueless and Instapundit. Overnight I became a blog junky. Wotmania was always where I started my day, but blogs began to quickly consume a large part of my online time.

Wotmania was always a hard place to be a Conservative. With the large numbers of international readers, the politics always tacked heavily to the Left. With the war in Afghanistan all ready in full swing, and the war in Iraq becoming more inevitable by the day, the boards became a very contentious place in 2002-2004. The craziness of the 2004 election is what finally drove me out of the Community board, and I stuck to the Games board where I didn't have to deal with politics anymore.

In the last five years, I've probably only ventured back into the Community board a handful of times, but the Games board has always been my homepage. Alas, the Games board has always been a little backwater that few people even knew existed. Eventually the regulars said just about everything there was to be said. We'd all gotten older and gaming time had become harder to find. In the last year, there were rarely more than a half-dozen threads visible (visibility was a combination of activity and posting date) at a time. On occasion a fresh face would pop in and start asking questions we'd covered so long ago we couldn't even remember where to link them.

In the mean time, the Community board, and particularly the Chat Room were giving Mike, the owner of the site, unending fits. So in late January of this year, he announced he was shutting down the whole site to focus on his research. There was a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth, but in the end there really wasn't anything to be done. No definitive date was given, but "August" was thrown about.

A couple people stepped up, and with some of the site source code that Mike allowed them to use, began trying to clone as much of the site functionality as possible in 7 months. (Wotmania has been an ongoing development project by Mike for 10 years. One single message board and simple chat room exploded into a half-dozen custom-coded forums, a custom chat room, an internal noteboard system, personal user journals, polls, theory libraries, encyclopedias, and even a miniature point system for no reason other than to have it, plus tons of other things I probably don't even know about because I haven't been out exploring the far corners of the site in years) They just managed to get the replacement site up in time for H-hour on D-day.

At midnight tonight, wotmania went off-line for good, and a huge part of my online life went with it. I managed to be there at the very end when the chat room finally winked out of existence. I got over most of the grief back in January when the announcement was made. I've had many forums I loved close on me, so I've had plenty of practice getting over this sort of thing, but wotmania was always there to come home to.

Sure, there's a bit of resentment, but then again I can understand where Mike is coming from. Robert Jordan died before finishing the series (a topic that was morbidly theorized and joked about constantly on the boards given his glacial pace of writing in the latter books.). Mike had lost interest in the series a couple book prior, so it's understandable that he was simply tired of supporting a site that no longer held any passion for him. Each new book would create a surge of excitement amongst the people still dedicated to the books, but for many, the site itself had become the reason to stick around. There was a community that evolved out of the mutual interest in the books, and the community has outlasted the books.

Whenever someone posed a question to Jordan that he intended to answer in latter books, he always responded, "Read and find out." As an homage to their roots in Wheel of Time, the new home is located at readandfindout.com. This new home has a WoT specific forum for those who still want to discuss and speculate on what Jordan's widow may be able to do with his notes for the last book, but it's really about serving as a new home for the Community.

If you find yourself bored, stop by the Games board in the Entertainment section. You'll find me going by Yaminohasha. Stop in and say hi.